Nowadays information processing apparatuses, such as electronic notebooks, for storing and displaying data are widely used. A display control apparatus for controlling a display section of such an information processing apparatus needs to scale displayed data, so as to enable the user to, for example, recognize the configuration as a whole and look at data displayed in a certain portion in a more detailed manner.
There are two kinds of data: text data (see FIG. 4) containing information on characters and numerals, and image data, or information on images (see FIG. 5). A display control apparatus can display both text data and image data on a display screen of a display section at the same time. A display of such a manner is called a mixed one-sight display, and here is how the mixed one-sight display is realized. The display screen is divided into a plurality of blocks (scale-down display areas), and the text data and the image data are scaled down so as to be accommodated in respective blocks. However, a conventional display control apparatus applies the same scale-down percentage to both the text data and the image data in carrying out the mixed one-sight display.
In the mixed one-sight display, the user often needs the text data to be displayed for confirmation of the content thereof and the image data to be displayed for confirmation of the configuration as a whole.
When a low scale-down percentage (for example, 66%) is used in the conventional mixed one-sight display with priority given to a display of the text data rather than to that of the image data, it is easy to recognize the content of the text data, which is scaled down only by a low percentage. However, in some cases, such a mixed one-sight display cannot accommodate the content of the image data in a scale-down display area and the user cannot recognize the whole image. Also, as to the text data, since only a small number of characters can be accommodated in one line, not all the characters are always displayed in a single line. A sentence, if cut off halfway, often cannot be well understood. Therefore, in a case when not all the characters are displayed in a single line, and therefore the content of the sentence cannot be well understood, the user must scroll the scale-down display area in "a row direction" every time he/she reads a line, which often poses a great inconvenience to the user.
Note that "a row direction" here refers to a horizontal direction when the text data is written horizontally, and refers to a vertical direction when the text data is written vertically, for example, as when the display is in the Japanese language. Note also that "a column direction" is perpendicular to a row direction, or in other words, refers to a vertical direction when the text data is written horizontally, and refers to a horizontal direction when the text data is written vertically.
By contrast, when a high scale-down percentage (for example, 50%) is used with priority given to a display of the image data rather than to that of the text data, it is easy to recognize the whole image of the image data. However, in some cases, the content of the text data is hard to recognize due to a low resolution. Therefore, for example, the scale-down percentage must be reduced to confirm the content of the text data, which often poses inconvenience to the user.